Google Photos for iPad

Google introduced their competitor to iCloud Photo Library yesterday and it’s simply called Google Photos. It’s available right now across iOS, Android, and the web. The huge draw of Google Photos is that it offers unlimited storage of 16 MP compressed photos and 1080p video, which means that you don’t have to worry about how big your own photo library is growing and how much that’s going to cost you over time. The system is also smart enough to identify people and contexts within the Photos, which means there’s much less manual sorting to do, but also means that Google is analyzing the content you are uploading.

I’m trying Google Photos out just to see what it’s like and see if it’s faster than iCloud Photo Library for remote access, though I’m not sure if I like the idea of Google being able to reuse my personal content in advertising. I accept that that can happen with Facebook, but that’s also why I only upload a very specific subset of my photos to that service. In order to use Google Photos, you really have to go all in.

Competition in this space is good, though, and I think it will quickly force Apple to up their game with iCloud Photo Library sooner rather than later.